filed under: geek, tagging, textpattern, tru_tags

10 November 2007

To learn more about tru_tags, check out the other tru_tags articles on this site.

Current Release

tru_tags 3.10 (UNTESTED – probably works with PHP 8) (download)

Forum announcement

Fixed PHP compatibility via community pull request (thank you!)

Previous Releases

tru_tags 3.9 (for TXP 4.6 and above) (download)

Forum announcement

This release fixes an issue with saving articles on the Write tab, and improves how the tag cloud is inserted into that page.

tru_tags 3.8 (for TXP 4.6 and above) (download)

Forum announcement

This release just provides compatibility fixes for PHP and Textpattern.

tru_tags 3.7 (for TXP 4.0.7 and above (including 4.2.0)) (download)

Forum announcement

This release includes two major things:

1. a change to the way URLs are encode for “tags with spaces” and “tags-with-hyphens” and “tags+with+plusses” and “tags that-mix+them”. See this commit message for a great explanation of the problem and the fix.
2. a performance improvement as suggested by whocarez on the forums

tru_tags 3.6 (for TXP 4.0.7 and above (including 4.2.0)) (download)

Forum announcement

This release is mostly a bug-fix release, but includes a few functional improvements also. It includes a large performance improvement for article lists, if you are/were showing the tags associated with each article.

The changes include:

• Added tru_tags_search_result_excerpt to work around a problem with using TXP’s search_result_excerpt for tag search pages.
• Added a 404_redirect attribute to tru_tags_handler to allow disabling of the 404 redirect feature. This is necessary when calling tru_tags_handler twice, for example when showing sticky articles followed by non-sticky articles.
• Expanded the tag clouds on the Write page and Extensions page to include future-dated tags and tags from non-searchable sections.
• Significantly improved the performance of tru_tags_from_article on article list pages by removing an unnecessary database query.
• Worked around a few javascript/DOM issues in IE that broke styling of the tags on the Write tab.
• Fixed a compatibility issue with other plugins that also use txp_prefs.php (by using include_once instead of include).
• Replaced all PHP calls to split() with explode() for compatibility with more PHP versions.
• Removed documentation (from the usage instructions about using rss_admin_show_adv_opts because it is no longer needed in TXP 4.2.0 and above.
• Fixed/improved support for using double-quotes in tag names (which could cause problems on the Write tab).
• Fixed a warning that could appear if using showcounts with tru_tags_handler.

tru_tags 3.5 (for TXP 4.0.7 and above) (download)

Forum announcement

This release adds support for auto-completing tag names on the admin-side write tab (many thanks to Jim Biancolo, who provided the javascript!), and also fixes a few bugs.

In order to enable auto-complete, you must upload jquery.autocomplete.css and jquery.autocomplete.min.js from the jQuery Autocomplete plugin into a “js” folder at the root of your site. Once that is done, you can turn on the feature using one of the configuration options on the plugin Extension tab (in the admin).

The bugs that were fixed include:

• Fixed problems with multi-byte (utf-8, unicode, international) characters. If you run into any un-fixed problems, there is an option on the Extensions page that will allow you to turn off case-insensitivity, which should work around the problems (but you’ll have to type all your tag names with the same case)
• Fixed a minor javascript problem that was causing issues on Opera (thanks to a user submission)
• Fixed a few leftover sorting problems relating to tags with international characters
• Fixed a bug where the activeClass CSS class wasn’t being set correctly for tags-with-hyphens.

tru_tags 3.4 (for TXP 4.0.7 and above) (download)

Forum announcement

This is a minor release with a small bugfix and a few infrastructure changes. The bugfix is that tru_tags should now correctly support sorting with non-English characters, although I haven’t tested it. The infrastructure changes are that the tru_tags source code and documentation can now always be found at http://code.google.com/p/tru-tags/source/browse/#svn/trunk, so in case my site ever goes down (again), they will still be available online.

tru_tags 3.3 (for TXP 4.0.7 and above) (download)

Forum announcement

This is a minor release that updates the tru_tags admin pages to point to my new website (rainskit.com) and updates tru_tags to support article expiration dates (which were introduced in TXP 4.0.7). This release also fixed a minor bug with the way tag clouds were counting future-dated articles, if showcounts="any" was set.

tru_tags 3.2 (for TXP 4.0.5 and above) (download)

Forum announcement

This release includes a few minor features, plus the ability to create a tag-based archive page.

The features include a new tag parameter for tru_tags_if_tag_search, improvements to the striphyphens attribute of tru_tags_parameter, improvements to the documentation, a new tag_parameter attribute for tru_tags_related_tags_from_search, a new sub-section (named “Reference”) on the tru_tags Extensions page (in the TXP admin), and two new tags (tru_tags_archive and tru_tags_current_archive_tag) that enable tag-based archive pages (instructions, “example”/archive/).

It also deprecates tru_tags_search_parameter in favor of the built-in TXP function that does the same thing.

There are no bug fixes.

Please see the documentation for details.

tru_tags 3.1 (for TXP 4.0.5 and above) (download)

Forum announcement

This is a minor bugfix release, fixing issues created in 3.0. Specifically, messy URLs are fixed on clean-url sites, and the text on the admin page has been updated to be clearer.

tru_tags 3.0 (for TXP 4.0.5 and above) (download)

Forum announcement

This major release adds an admin-side configuration tab for tru_tags, a few tools for renaming and deleting tags across all articles, support for redirecting outdated tags to newer tags, and 404 support. It also fixes a number of minor bugs. This release should be backwards-compatible with tru_tags v2.3, so all users are encouraged to upgrade.

Note that this version of tru_tags may create tables in your Textpattern database, if you update your preferences or set up redirects. If you don’t do either of these things, or if you reset everything back to its default state, the tables will be removed.

tru_tags 2.3 (for TXP 4.0.4 and above) (download)

Forum announcement

This is primarily a bug-fix release, in that tru_tags now supports tags with more unusual characters in their names (like apostrophes, question marks, etc.), both in tag clouds and in the admin-side tag list. It does not support tags with double quotes (") in the name. Note that I’ve also discovered a bug with tags that mix spaces and dashes in the name (“like this-one”); I won’t be fixing that bug.

tru_tags 2.2 (for TXP 4.0.4 and above) (download)

Forum announcement

Features include: In the tag cloud/list, on a tag search page, the tag currently under search is given a class of tagActive (by default), or whatever you set in the activeclass attribute. Added some fancy javascript tricks and UI enhancements to make admin-side tagging easier. Fixed a bug with clean URLs for sites not at the root of the domain (e.g. http://example.com/extrapath/textpattern/).

tru_tags 2.1 (for TXP 4.0.4 and above) (download)

Forum announcement

This release includes a few basic features and a number of bugfixes, including:

The plugin automatically turns clean URLs on if your site is configured for clean URLs. This behavior can be overridden. Tag clouds can be configured to link to alternate sites (like Technorati). A new attribute enables text-transformations at the plugin level, rather than having to do them through CSS. Two new attributes give finer-grained control over which sections are included / excluded from the tag cloud(s). Fixed a bug where the tag cloud(s) weren’t generating correct links for users with messy URLs. Fixed an error that was generated when there weren’t any tagged articles yet (or no tags in a filtered cloud). Partially fixed a bug with the way tag URLs were being logged in the Textpattern admin, if clean URLs were turned on. Fixed a warning message that would appear if php logging was turned up to show “notify” messages.

tru_tags 2.0 (for TXP 4.0.4 and above)

Forum announcement

This release represents a major step forward for tru_tags. In addition to some minor bugfixes and enhancements, it includes:

• Clean URLs without having to modify .htaccess
• Tags are included in RSS and Atom feeds
• It’s possible to add content to articles in RSS and Atom feeds
• Tags are shown on the admin side when writing/editing articles
• Tag clouds can be limited to a maximum number of tags

Please read the upgrade instructions (below) before upgrading from a previous version of tru_tags. This version has a few small incompatibilities with old versions.

Additional features/bugfixes include: The tagsection attribute has been removed and replaced with a configuration parameter in the plugin code. Changing configuration parameters in the plugin code is easier. There’s a new attribute on tru_tags_tag_parameter to let you urlencode the tag (so you can embed it in links). There’s no longer any need for a nasty workaround to make clean urls work with non-alphanumeric characters. It’s now safe (and functional) to use HTML characters in tag names. There are some slight performance improvements. Fixed a bug that was causing the tag cloud to add spaces before the commas, in some situations. Fixed a bug with showing tag counts for tags that were numbers. Fixed the warning messages that appeared when Textpattern was in ‘testing’ mode

Upgrade Instructions

First, clean URLs no longer require .htaccess modifications, and those modifications should be removed. (It is likely that tru_tags will still work with the .htaccess rewrite rules, but it’s not supported.) Please remove the rules from your .htaccess file, and then flip the switch in the plugin code as usual. (Note that I’ve simplified the in-code configuration, but it should be easy to figure out what to do.)

Second, if you named your tag section anything other than “tag” you’ll need to remove the tagsection attribute from your tru_tags_cloud, tru_tags_list, tru_tags_from_article, and tru_tags_related_tags_from_search tags, and set the name of your section in the plugin code. Look for define('TRU_TAGS_SECTION', 'tag'); (right at the top).

Third, if you were using the double-urlencode workaround before, you shouldn’t need it any more. Your URLs for affected tags may change, though (because they won’t be double-encoded).

tru_tags 1.10

Forum announcement

A ‘secret’ release that included tags in RSS/Atom feeds.

tru_tags 1.9

Forum announcement

Mostly bugfixes. Fixed an issue created in v1.6 for people who don’t have the mb_strtolower() function. Added support for non-alphanumeric characters (like ‘+’) in tag names, but see the instructions for how to work around an apache bug to make it work. Fixed an annoyance where an extra comma on the end of a tag list would cause tru_tags to think there was a blank tag, and try to show it in the cloud. Added a title attribute to the cloud and article tags, to control the tooltip for the tags.

tru_tags 1.8

Forum announcement

Massive refactoring of the code in order to introduce tru_tags_related_tags_from_search, which generates a “related tags” cloud based on tag search results. Also added a feature whereby the article tag list can be rendered as a mini-cloud. This version was sponsored by Simon Finch – please thank him if you find these features useful!

tru_tags 1.7

Forum announcement

Added support for sorting the tag cloud by tag frequency.

tru_tags 1.6

Forum announcement

Fixed a bug with the spaces support that was putting dashes in the url. Made textpattern’s per-article custom/override forms work. Improved support for unicode/international characters. Added support for rel="nofollow".

tru_tags 1.5

Forum announcement

Fixed code that was causing php to generate a warning message. Made it possible to put spaces in the Keywords field between the tags (you still need commas).

tru_tags 1.4

Forum announcement

Tags with spaces no longer generate urls with %20 in them. Can now turn off links and just output the tag names. Added styles for each tag size, and a way to turn off the built-in tag sizing, so you can have complete control over the display. Added the ability to hide the smallest/largest tags.

tru_tags 1.3

Forum announcement

Made it possible to use the section attribute with tru_tags_handler, for a single section. Bumped Textpattern’s default article-output limit to 1000, when doing a tag search. Added support for txp:else with tru_tags_if_has_tags.

tru_tags 1.2

Forum announcement

Added hackish support for clean urls, including the rel="tag" attribute. Documented attributes for tru_tags_handler. Added support for showing tag counts in the title attribute in the tag cloud.

tru_tags 1.1

Forum announcement

Fixed a bug when tru_tags was used on a site configured with messy urls. Added a more generic form of tru_tags_cloud named tru_tags_list, and made tru_tags_cloud call it. Added new attributes to tru_tags_list for controlling font sizes and showing how many times a tag has been used. (Thanks to gdtroiano for that last feature.)

tru_tags 1.0

Forum announcement

Added text to the code and help about copyright, GPL, and ran_tags. Backwards-compatible change to the tru_tags_cloud tag, to support multiple sections in the “section” attribute. Bumped the version to 1.0.

tru_tags 0.9

Forum announcement

I originally released this “with no license” but per the Textpattern FAQ, plugins have to be distributed under the GPL.